You'll be gripped by this fictionalised account of the life of the remarkable Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. I had to keep reminding myself of the time this family was alive and the boundaries they had to live within. However, Tassi’s arrival leads to a terrible experience for Artemisia – something I won’t go into here because I think any reader who has come to this book with little or no knowledge of Artemisia’s life will probably prefer to discover her story for themselves. Not because of the rape itself-- I know about Artemisia Gentileschi's life and I knew what I was getting into. I mean, I am as Artemisia–obsessed as anybody, but our heroine here is brilliant and faultless from six-years old onward… so it’s a point of view, but not one that’d be entirely manageable if not for the harrowing events that we all know are coming along the way.

Artemesia Gentileschi (an Italian Baroque painter considered to be one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists) is a woman who learns from an early age how to stand up to her manipulative father.Dit is het verhaal van een jong meisje dat onrecht wordt aangedaan en die daar erkenning voor probeert te krijgen en er vooral uit wil ontsnappen. Breaking the gender binary is fine when she's in control of it, but the bodies of nonbinary / trans / gnc people are also useful as a medium of disgust and horror. Ik stond afgelopen voorjaar voor haar Judith slaying Holofernes in het Uffizi met open ogen te kijken.

And yet, despite the tragedy and the frustration and the horrible, awful parallels to modern society, this is a book that is full of hope, and strength and beauty. It does all this to further the idea that Artemisia was ahead of her time, that the establishment (men) couldn't understand her, and that she had feminism all figured out before it had ever been invented. C. Fremantle she has written two gripping historical thrillers: The Poison Bed and The Honey and the Sting. The attention to detail — so necessary in a narrative filled with painters — is absolutely engrossing and doesn’t let you forget for a moment that this is 17th-century Rome.I do enjoy a story that dusts off an important female figure from history to shine the light in our contemporary world. Sinds ik een aantal jaar geleden Susan Vreeland's boek over Artemisia las, vind ik zowel haar levensverhaal als haar werk fascinerend. The strength Artemisia shows in refusing to be a victim and in seeing justice done is powerfully depicted by the author and yet I personally felt the story missed something by not portraying any real degree of vulnerability (other than towards others judgement of her art), when her life experiences, trials and tribulations would test the resolve and strength of any human being. There's a scene where Gentileschi is horrified that a man might find her Susannah and the Elders painting sexy, and yet previously she bemoaned how other artists cavalierly depict female nudity.

She can see with absolute clarity the way in which works of art - all art - speak to each other down the years. In the same year she painted her infamous Judith , and one of the great Renaissance masters was born.It’s such a skill to be able to take facts from history and weave them through fiction to bring that time to life. The feminist element is strong and forceful in this book, downtrodden yet defiant Artemisia Gentileschi’s life and Fremantle’s interpretation of this feels congruent, heart clenching, and gut wrenching. Imbued with historical detail and suffused with imagination, this is an exceptional work of biographical fiction. What we do know is that she was tortured during the trial , a painful torture involving breaking the fingers of the person and that this could have affected her talent.

The descriptive power of the novel transported me straight to the heart of Renaissance Rome with some passages so beautiful I had to read them twice. As the author unravels the story of her early life and the trauma that occurs to her, I could see that her paintings evolve and could be described as violent, unflinching demonstrations of male debasement.On many levels …At times I felt for Orazio (her father), trying to keep the family reputation intact so that his commissions didn’t dry up. I loved the way Fremantle ties Gentileschi's art into her life, capturing the raw emotion of her paintings on the page.